Yes, I know I haven’t been posting much news lately. I am bad. But plenty is going on, trust me!

Regular visitors may have noticed that the Drachengott quartet is no longer listed on the “About The Books” page. This is because the series has been temporarily withdrawn from sale since I acquired the rights back from the publisher on request. I am currently looking for a new home for it, and updates will come as I have them. But either way when they are re-released it will be with different covers.

In the meantime I have a couple of new projects in the works, one of which is currently with my agent(s). Stay tuned!

Well it’s taken a while but The Last Guard is back! After a slight delay due to copyright issues with the original publisher, the new edition is up on Amazon and should be available for purchase in the next couple of days.

In other news, I have just recently signed a contract for an all new stand-alone fantasy novel with Odyssey Books! The working title is Shadow of the Skytree, and it’s currently scheduled for publication in about mid-2018. This one is a little bit different from my previous works in that it is in many ways primarily a romance. But it also contains the following: Black, Russian-speaking, fireball-throwing dwarves, Italian-speaking steampunk humans who ride clockwork horses, and a gnome who rides a very small dragon.

Hi everybody! It gives me great pleasure to finally announce that I’ve just signed a contract to continue the Cymrian Saga with Black Phoenix Publishing, the publishing collective which did such a great job with The Price of Magic.

The Last Guard is scheduled for re-release in December of this year, and the sequels will follow in 2018. The ridiculously talented Amber Goodhart is still on board to do the covers plus internal illustrations. For now, here’s a picture I drew of Cadfael the Scholar (last seen in Tales of Cymria) exploring the ruins of Old Eagleholm. Long-time readers may recognise the pub sign from the Sign of the Red Rat, where Arren Cardockson spent many happy evenings with his friends before their lives fell apart. To this day, Arenadd thinks of the Red Rat as “the place where we were happy”.

There are a few answers for that. At the time when I wrote it I was just coming off the success of the Fallen Moon and Risen Sun trilogies, which were part of a series which is quite complex â€“ not to mention long. The cast is huge, the plot is â€“ dare I say â€“ epic, and the events of the series take place at various points in no less than thirteen different countries (yeah, it gets bigger as it goes along, trust me). I was in the mood for writing something a little simpler, with a broader audience appeal. Less politics, more magic, and more spectacle. I also wanted to write something less bleak (the first book of The Fallen Moon was rejected by no less than three publishers for being â€śtoo depressingâ€ť). Something a bit more fun.

At that time I was taking evening classes in German, just for the challenge of it. Iâ€™ve always been good with languages and had already learned some German in highschool. So when it came to creating the setting, I thought why not do something a little different and specifically base it on Germany? Thus the place names are German, most of the character names are German, and most of the protagonists explicitly speak German. In the second book, I introduced a couple of French-speaking characters. During the â€śconceptualâ€ť phase I consulted my German tutor to make sure Iâ€™d gotten it right, and most of the place names actually have a specific meaning in that language. For example, â€śDrachenburgâ€ť means â€śdragon castle/fortâ€ť. â€śZauberwaldâ€ť means â€śmagic forestâ€ť. â€śHundbergâ€ť means, roughly, â€śdog mountainâ€ť. â€śThalerâ€ť was a currency used in Germany before the Deutschmark came along. And so on.

Syn the dragon was originally intended to be the main protagonist, and though that didnâ€™t really work out in the end, mostly because I realised Rutger worked better as the (initial) protagonist, she remains the driving force behind the story. It is her visions which show the four protagonists the way to go. But I deliberately left it ambiguous as to whether her visions are an absolutely accurate revelation of the future, or whether they only come true because she obsessively works to make it so. Itâ€™s telling that she never really questions whether her visions are real or not, or where they come from. Nobody else can see the future â€“ just her. When the truth is eventually revealed, it all falls into place. Thereâ€™s a reason why she never questioned her dreams of the future, and it all comes back to the Drachengott, who is easily the most mysterious figure in the series. Whose side is he truly on? What does he actually want? In all honesty, for a long time I wasnâ€™t too sure myself.

I wanted to play with the idea of a prophecy/seer which may in fact be either a lie, or a trap. I also wanted to have a seer character who, not content simply to tell the hero whatâ€™s going to happen next and leave it at that, is so determined to make her visions become reality that she will stoop to absolutely anything â€“ even murder. If you read between the lines of the series, Syn does some pretty heinious things behind the scenes and in some respects is probably a lot more evil than the Drachengott himself. But itâ€™s all for the sake of a greater causeâ€¦ or is it?

Links

Aethas
The website of my friend A.L.Jones, who illustrated the Australian covers for The Fallen Moon, drew the maps for the American edition, and designed and built this website! Yes, sheâ€™s a woman of many talents.